On the top floor of London’s Hayward Gallery sits a colossal installation that demands the audience’s undivided attention. Created by Haegue Yang, it’s composed of a staircase-like structure of ascending Venetian blinds and two moving spotlights performing a hypnotic dance to classical music, which cast entwining shadows on the walls and floor. Its parts may be simple but taking it in as a whole is a poetic experience.
“‘Poetic’ is, for me personally, a very polluted word,” said Yang. “Other people can say that, but I won’t. Maybe I have too much respect for poetry.” The work, titled Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024), is an ambitious new commission featured in the exhibition “Leap Year,” a sprawling show at the Hayward Gallery that marks Yang’s first survey in the U.K. Organized by Yung Ma, the gallery’s senior curator, the show can be understood as an exploration of the unique dynamic that develops between an artist and a curator in making an exhibition. It is also, ultimately, a show about how desire fuels creativity.
Installation view of “Haegue Yang: Leap Year.” Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
The South Korean artist, is very conscious about her choice of most words, as is plain to see within the show. Even if some of the elements of her work are straightforward—she is known for presenting everyday domestic items, like drying racks, on a grand scale—the titles of the works on view can be long and complicated. Detailed wall texts are also common alongside her installations, as if they are part of the works, too. These extended strings of words represent the process of art-making for Yang, who likens it to “weaving together a piece of fabric so complex it is impossible to unweave.”
If making art is like weaving, then curating is like tailoring: Pulling all of the artist’s fabrics together into a garment that is comfortable to wear. “Art-making and exhibition-making are very different process, but they are both creative processes,” said Yang. Compared to a project-based exhibition, featuring mostly newly created works, a survey exhibition “is more than tailoring a piece of clothing because all the textiles are made already, and when we have hundreds of pieces of fabrics,” she added. “It’s like reading, making a road, or landscaping.”
Installation view of “Haegue Yang: Leap Year.” Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
Yang and Ma have known each other for nearly a decade and the show feels like an intimate exploration of the the artist’s oeuvre for this reason. Most of the works on view were drawn from the artist’s archive, tracing her practice back to 1995. The exhibition features iconic works from some of her most notable series, including “Light Sculptures” and “Sonic Sculptures,” as well as early pieces from the “Venetian blind installations” and her performative sculptures known as Dress Vehicles. For anyone unfamiliar with her work, these offer a succinct primer on the artist’s visual poetry.
Yang, 51, has been dividing her time between Seoul and Berlin since the mid-1990s. She has long been interested in connecting personal and political histories as well as folklore and nature. This is reflected in some of the new works conceived or re-staged with Ma’s help. For instance, the newly commissioned Sonic Droplets in Gradiation — Water Veil (2024) is an interactive work that invites the audience to walk through a curtain of silver and blue stainless steel bells that emits echoing sounds when they enter the exhibition. For Yang, sonic reverberations have been a way to explore the relationship between the spiritual and material realms for years. The decision to create the work and install it at the entrance was made during the initial stages of the planning for the show as it provides an immediately immersive experience while blending East Asian and Western artistic traditions.
Haegue Yang, Sonic Rescue Ropes(2021-2022). Installation view at M+, Hong Kong, 2021. © Haegue Yang. Photo: Lok Check & Dan Leung. Courtesy M+, Hong Kong.
Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun, on the other hand, was not part of the original plan. Yang created it with encouragement from Ma, who has a deep understanding of Yang’s practice—and a personal awareness of her creative obsession with the Korean-born composer Isang Yun. For years, Yang has been deeply researching Yun, a Korean political dissident.
Born in 1917 when the Korean peninsula was under Japanese occupation, Yun was imprisoned and tortured for taking part in the resistance against Japan. He became a part of the international avant-garde after establishing a music career in Berlin, but he was abducted by the Korean secret police in 1967 and brought back to Seoul. Following his release two years later, he returned to Berlin, where he continued to compose and teach music until his death in 1995.
Installation view of Star-Crossed Rendezvous after Yun (2024) at “Haegue Yang: Leap Year.” Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
“He was one of those artists who lived one’s life in the middle of this political rupture,” Yang said. “Every South Korean has heard of his name, but people would know about his political narratives rather than his music, which was quickly forgotten. I thought it was very disproportional, which also stimulated my curiosity [in him].
Her curiosity became consuming—one could even say desirous—and she took every opportunity to listen to his music and also met with people who knew him while he was alive. “It has been a long-time wish for me to ‘exorcise’ Isang Yun out of me,” Yang said. Yet the only kind of work she had made so far that related to him was a text-based piece, a 2018 conceptual work titled A Chronology of Conflated Dispersion – Duras and Yun. It references the biographies of Yun and the French novelist Marguerite Duras, who shared a similar timeline as Yun.
The Yun-inspired installation at Hayward Gallery felt “risky,” Yang said, but it also provided her with the opportunity “to step into the unknown.” It is the result of her interpretation of the composer’s contemplative, romantic music piece, Double Concerto (1977). The music references a Korean folktale about condemned lovers who were torn apart on the opposite ends of the galaxy and only allowed to meet once a year. The choreography of the two moving spotlights, separated by the Venetian blinds structure, are connected by the music.
Haegue Yang’s Windy Terrace Beyond Reach (2024), installed on the terrace of London’s Hayward Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery.
“You know for us, the term reunification is a political issue. I think a lot about Isang Yun, an act of tracing his mind. He took this love story, a romantic motif embedded in a folktale, and expanded it,” the artist explained. “In my interpretation, he was talking about his time, the lived history, while referring back to ancient times. I see this in my practice, too.”
Another very personal work in the show echoes some of these themes. Sadong 30 (2006) was originally installed at her grandparent’s former home, which was then abandoned and rundown; the work’s title is the address of the house. It marked the artist’s first solo show in Korea and is considered pivotal moment in her career as it introduced some of the themes that now define her work, not only her reuse of everyday objects as stand-ins for thoughts and feelings, but also the inclusion of narratives that blur the line between private thought and public memory. Sadong 30 also reflects on the passage of time and the changes that Yang saw in the urban fabric of her home country. Ma decided to re-construct this piece for the Hayward Gallery survey, driven by his own “selfishness” to see the work that he had never experienced, while also offering a rare glimpse into Yang’s world.
“I would read that [selfishness] as a desire,” Yang noted. “Desire has a lot to do with creativity.”
“Leap Year” runs through January 5, 2025 at Hayward Gallery, Southbank, London.